The barren state of Utah took another cruel beating in the public prints last week, and the 2002 Winter Olympic Games slipped another foul notch toward the Abyss.… First it was felony bribery, then a rash of scandalous Sex crimes, and finally a plague of meat-eating crickets.… It is an open secret now that Salt Lake City’s giddy ambition to host the first Winter Olympics on U.S. soil since 1980 is doomed to Shame & Failure.
Third-term GOP Governor Michael O. Leavitt, who is now the chairman of the EPA, appointed by Bush, has been fatally smeared, and three officials of the all-powerful Church of Latter-Day Saints are accused of covering up Bribery, Fraud, & shameless Prostitution. Even the mayor of Salt Lake City was staggered by the overweening Lewdness of the charges—which ranged from Pimping and Gross Sexual Imposition to Perjury and Wife Beating. Two prominent members of the original Salt Lake Organizing Committee were indicted by the U.S. Justice Department and will go on trial in July on a grab bag of State and Federal antibribery charges that could put them in prison for the rest of their lives.
Hosting the Winter Olympics is always a high-risk venture. The last winter festival in Nagano was a financial disaster for the Japanese Government and a monumental failure for the U.S. winter sports establishment.… And next year’s train wreck in Utah will be no different.
Everybody who goes there will be walking in the queasy shadow of punishment. Salt Lake City has developed such hideous worldwide Karma that success is out of the question. The SLOC has put Utah so deep in Debt for the next 30 years that No money will be available for anything except bribes, whiskey, and the mandatory 10 percent membership fee to the Church of Latter-Day Saints—the same corrupt greedheads who ran up the debt in the first place.
Corruption is a Way of Life in Utah, and they seem to like it that way. Mormons have been beating and cheating each other since the arrival of Brigham Young in 1847.… He was a stern and gentle man, they say, and nobody argued when he made Utah the permanent Kingdom of the Mormon Church and everything it stood for.
“So what?” my friend Cromwell snarled when I showed him the latest list of bizarre crimes allegedly committed by state officials and Church leaders in the ongoing Utah Olympics nightmare. “Nobody cares what happens in Utah anyway. It has always been a sinkhole of Vice and Corruption. The last time I went to Utah, I got busted for Soliciting a Prostitute in the Salt Lake Airport. It cost me $2,000 just to leave the State.”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “It’s the Mormon way of life—a handful of Gimme and a mouthful of Much Obliged. I know it well.”
Which was true. I am all too familiar with Utah.
—June 26, 2001